ARPA-E Announces $20M in Funding for 15 Projects

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has announced $20 million in funding for 15 projects that will develop a new class of sensor systems to enable significant energy savings via reduced demand for heating and cooling in residential and commercial buildings.

The Center for Lighting Enabled Systems & Applications (LESA) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, along with the University of New Mexico and LESA industry partner ABB, are working to create a low-cost, privacy-preserving sensor technology for counting, locating and tracking occupants in any commercial space that will be developed and tested. Image design courtesy of Vanessa Tan/ University of New Mexico.
The Center for Lighting Enabled Systems & Applications (LESA) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), along with the University of New Mexico (UNM) and LESA industry partner ABB Group, are working to create a low-cost, privacy-preserving sensor technology for counting, locating and tracking occupants in any commercial space that will be developed and tested. Funding for the entire project is $2.38 million over three years.

Today, about 13 percent of all energy produced in the U.S. is used to heat, cool and ventilate buildings, according to ARPA-E. Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) is the largest consumer of energy in commercial buildings, totaling 37 percent of all energy used in this sector. Much of this energy is wasted by heating, cooling and over-ventilating unoccupied or partially occupied spaces. Due to a lack of accurate and reliable occupancy information, existing building automation and control systems are limited in their ability to substantially reduce HVAC energy use.

"The award from ARPA-E allows LESA to build on its fundamental research showing the power of digitized light, which, when reflected from any object in the space, generates privacy-preserving occupancy and activity data," said Robert F. Karlicek Jr., LESA director, who also serves as a professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering at RPI. "In this program, the LESA team will apply its lighting tool kit concepts to achieving better energy efficiency in buildings, but this is only the start of how digitized illumination will become an essential part of any Internet of Things platform for smart buildings, health care, horticulture, new 5G wireless communications and cognitive environments. We are honored to work with our partners from the University of New Mexico and ABB to take our game-changing energy technology research to the next level."

The technology uses only high-efficiency, low-power IR LEDs and photodiodes for distance mapping, and with privacy preserved, can be used anywhere in the building. Studies of prototype occupancy sensing using this technology suggest that energy costs of heating and cooling can be reduced by up to 30 percent by training the building management system to deliver the right temperature air when and where it is needed. The data will also be invaluable for building utilization and security managers, simplifying the installation of new, energy-efficient, smart building systems and services.